“Often it is necessary, in order to maintain power, to act contrary to faith, contrary to charity, contrary to humanity, contrary to religion. . . .  A prince ought therefore to have great care that from his mouth nothing should ever come that is not filled with those five qualities, and that to see and hear him he should appear all piety, all faith, all integrity, all humanity, all religion.  And nothing is more necessary than to seem to have this last-mentioned quality.  Every one sees what you seem, few perceive what you are.”

Surely this hand-book of cant had been Philip’s ‘vade mecum’ through his life’s pilgrimage.

It is at least a consolation to reflect that a career controlled by such principles came to an ignominious close.  Had the mental capacity of this sovereign been equal to his criminal intent, even greater woe might have befallen the world.  But his intellect was less than mediocre.  His passion for the bureau, his slavery to routine, his puerile ambition personally to superintend details which could have been a thousand times better administered by subordinates, proclaimed every day the narrowness of his mind.  His diligence in reading, writing, and commenting upon despatches may excite admiration only where there has been no opportunity of judging of his labours by personal inspection.  Those familiar with the dreary displays of his penmanship must admit that such work could have been at least as well done by a copying clerk of average capacity.  His ministers were men of respectable ability, but he imagined himself, as he advanced in life, far superior to any counsellor that he could possibly select, and was accustomed to consider himself the first statesman in the world.

His reign was a thorough and disgraceful failure.  Its opening scene was the treaty of Catean Cambresis, by which a triumph over France had been achieved for him by the able generals and statesmen of his father, so humiliating and complete as to make every French soldier or politician gnash his teeth.  Its conclusion was the treaty of Vervins with the same power, by which the tables were completely turned, and which was as utterly disgraceful to Spain as that of Cateau Cambresis had been to France.  He had spent his life in fighting with the spirit of the age—­that invincible power of which he had not the faintest conception—­while the utter want of adaptation of his means to his ends often bordered, not on the ludicrous, but the insane.

He attempted to reduce the free Netherlands to slavery and to papacy.  Before his death they had expanded into an independent republic, with a policy founded upon religious toleration and the rights of man.  He had endeavoured all his life to exclude the Bearnese from his heritage and to place himself or his daughter on the vacant throne; before his death Henry iv. was the most powerful and popular sovereign that had ever reigned in France.  He had sought to invade and to conquer England, and to dethrone and assassinate